


the dead outside my window

by pprfaith



Series: Wishlist 2013 [3]
Category: The Mentalist
Genre: Alternate Universe, Community: wishlist_fic, Dark, Gen, Psychic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-12-06
Updated: 2013-12-06
Packaged: 2018-01-03 15:33:51
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,526
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1072145
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pprfaith/pseuds/pprfaith
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In one world, the lie Patrick Jane tells is, "I am not a psychic."</p>
            </blockquote>





	the dead outside my window

**Author's Note:**

> Peaceful_fury asked for _Mentalist, Jane, After the death of his family Jane started lying about his powers_  
>  \- It’s kind of plotless, but I like it, tbh. The thing about Jane is that he doesn’t actually have a point, usually.

+

Patrick Jane lies.

Patrick Jane tells the truth.

Patrick Jane finds his wife’s bloodless corpse only a few feet from his daughter’s small, still form and breaks.

+

She’s there, after the funeral, the wake, everything; she’s there in his peripheral vision, a grey, shapeless figure, a shade with a familiar face, and she whispers through bloodless lips, “Patrick, Pat, it wasn’t your fault.”

Lie.

He went on national television and told the truth and for that, the only thing he ever loved was taken from him.

Patrick Jane sees the dead and he has spoken to them all his life without ever making a secret of it. 

He has told the truth, always, because the truth was easy.

The truth was every single word he said about the man calling himself Red John, that wrecked, bleeding shell of a human being, that monster made from flesh and bone. 

The truth was a death sentence.

+

“Are you really psychic?” Van Pelt asks the first time she meets him, just like everyone else, and he sticks his hands in his pockets, shrugs and smiles (misdirection and distraction) and says, “No such thing.”

+

The dead linger.

It’s a secret he used to scream from the rooftops, but now, now. Now.

The dead linger and he averts his gaze, deliberately turns his back to them and stares at the living until his eyes burn. He fidgets, makes tea, plays with odds and ends, sticks his hands in all kinds of pockets. 

He makes up ridiculous observations and spins them into inane theories and tries to drown out the voices of the dead by talking his own ears off.

+

He keeps a notebook on his person at all times.

Inside it, every entry starts with _Dear John_ , and that’s spite and hatred and something almost like devotion, because what else would you call spending five years of your life chasing a ghost?

 _Dear John_ , it says, and then follows a list of all the truths he’s not telling. _I know what your father did to you. I know what your mother didn’t do. I know that you can’t sleep. I know what my wife whispered to you as she died. I know who killed that man, this girl, that woman._

_I know who did it._

_I know where you buried that neighbour’s dog in fourth grade and where you buried the girl who owned it six years later._

_I know._

He never reads what he’s written and he never lets anyone see. 

Lisbon asks him what’s in the notebooks, once.

He lies.

+

Here are the lies Patrick Jane tells everyday:

There are no psychics.

He can’t see the dead.

He’s not suicidal.

He’s not being eaten alive by it all.

He doesn’t lie. 

He doesn’t care.

He adds them to the notebook. 

+

_Dear John,_

_this is what you made me. Are you proud or scared?_

+

Rigsby carries his dead mother with him. When he sits at his desk, long limbs tucked into tight angles, she crowds against his back and puts her hands on his shoulder, like she’s sheltering him from something. 

It takes Jane five minutes and two questions to figure out what from.

But until Rigsby’s father turns up, drunk and suspected of a murder, he doesn’t say a single word about it. 

+

_Dear John,_

_My own father was almost as much of a bastard as yours. The only difference is that mine knew he needed my talents to survive._

+

“Jane,” Lisbon yells, loud and afraid and harried. “Jane, goddamn, where are you!”

“Here!” he calls, crouched on dirty cement, keeping a witness’s insides from spilling all over his new shoes.

Lisbon shoots around the corner, gun in hand and then drops to her knees next to him, one hand already going to her phone, gun aimed at where she came from.

“That was stupid,” she chides between dialling 911. “You could be the one on the ground right now!”

“Nothing was going to happen to me,” he tells her. His shirtsleeves are soaked red. He hates the colour. 

She barks orders into her mobile, hangs up on the operator. “You didn’t know that!” she snaps.

But he did. All the killer’s previous victims, crouched around them in a semi circle, bellowing for the witness to _live, live, live_ , have told him so. 

He smiles at her, thinly, and feels the girl bleeding out under his hands.

+

His daughter’s seventh birthday passes, her ninth, her twelfth. 

She stays a toddler in his memories, untouched by time until he knows that the person she would be now has nothing at all in common with the happy, burbling baby that sometimes flits through his field of vision.

He mourns her anew, fills the last page of his notebook and burns it. 

The next day he buys a new one.

+

_Dear John,_

_one day I will find you and I will shove every truth I have never told down your throat until you choke on them. Then I will shoot you in the face._

+

Lisbon has a trail of dead following her, partners, lovers, people she killed.

There were fewer when he started working with her. There’s three, four times as many now and he can see in the shadows under her eyes that she sometimes isn’t sure it’s worth the price. 

“Maybe you should let her go,” his wife suggest in the middle of a team meeting, perched on top of the television in the corner.

“I already let you go,” he tells her in a whisper, ignoring Van Pelt’s raised eyebrows. 

+

Cho is the easiest to deal with, in a way. He’s solid as rock, steady as the earth, still as the depths of the ocean. 

He is at peace with himself, or something very close to it, because there are no dead at his back, no-one to shelter him or scream at him.

He exists, self-contained and alone and Jane sometimes sits next to him in the office and just breathes the other man in, slow and methodical, until his wife’s outline is dulled and blurred, until he can’t hear his dead daughter’s laugh or their current victim’s screams.

“You’re strange,” Cho tells him every now and then with a sideways looks, but never like he really cares.

“Mhm,” Jane says, shrugging. He swings his feet a little, taps a tattoo on the table top and finally asks, “I’m making tea. Do you want some?”

Cho nods and doesn’t say anything else for the next hour.

+

_Dear John,_

_they say it’s impossible to tell how many people you have killed, directly or indirectly. But I know. I know because every single one of them has come to me at night and whispered their secrets in my ear._

_Your secrets._

_I know you, because one hundred and twenty-three people told me who you are._

+

Sometimes he slips up and stares at a ghost for too long, lets himself be distracted by one to the point of zoning out. Lisbon, Rigsby and most strangers look at him with pity or frustration.

Cho doesn’t look at all, just nudges him in the side until he’s back on track. 

Van Pelt blinks twice – it’s a tell – and then averts her gaze from the spot he’s been staring at. 

She reminds him, more than any other, of his wife, the gentle strength, the spine of steel under sweet, shy smiles and a penchant for not saying ‘no’ nearly often enough. 

The CBI isn’t the right place for her, not really. She belongs in a school, a nursery, somewhere where she can create, not break. But she’s chosen this path for herself and Jane would never tell her otherwise. 

It’s hard sometimes, not telling people what to do just because he _knows_ , but he has no more rights to the living than he does to the dead.

+

“You are, aren’t you?” Van Pelt asks, leaning in the doorway to his little attic hide-out, staring at his wall of connections and murders, murders and connections.

“What?” he asks, not looking up from his notebook. _Dear John,..._

“Psychic,” she answers and steps inside, uninvited. Or perhaps invited, because she, of all people, is always welcome. 

He gives her a shrewd look. “What makes you say that?”

She shrugs, perches on the windowsill. If she were a bird, she’d be an owl. “I have eyes. You’re not really good at... hiding.”

Trailing off without waiting for an answer, or the inevitable denial, she asks, “Who do you see when you...?”

She looks a little of the left of where her father stands next to her, back straight, gaze proud. Jane puts down his pen and smiles at her. After a moment she smiles back, nodding. 

+

Patrick Jane lies and he tells the truth, but only in letters to a man he will one day murder in cold blood.

Sometimes, in between, he does neither one nor the other but simply sits and smiles and keeps his silence. 

Cho sits quietly next to him and Van Pelt returns his smiles without hesitation or demands.

All around them, their dead blink in and out of existence, waiting patiently. 

Jane exhales.

+

+


End file.
